Thursday, August 31, 2006

With each passing day, a crucially significant political distinction in New Orleans gets clearer and clearer: Property owners are able to assert their interests in the polity, while non-owners are nearly as invisible in civic life now as in the early eighteenth century.

Among other things, the travesty in New Orleans reminds us that capitalism enshrines the prerogatives of property owners—and the bigger the holdings, the more substantial the voice.

This underscores why a simplistically racial interpretation of the injustices perpetrated in New Orleans is inadequate, even when those injustices cluster heavily along racial lines. Substantial numbers of blacks as well as whites are in a position to benefit materially from this regime; blacks as well as whites support the de facto creation of a property owners’ republic. It is possible simultaneously to include black people as stakeholders in the equation for rebuilding the city and to exclude poor people. This is the truth beneath the 200 sociologists’ assurance that their proposal for dispersing the poor would not “depopulate the city of its historically black communities.” But this is a sleight of hand that seeks to sanitize class cleansing with a patter of racial respect.

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

I've read, here and there, different accounts of what happened a year ago, and what's happened since. But Kate is back, with the beautiful writing that gets past the debris to what was New Orleans.

random thoughts:

Why did CNN send their African correspondent to cover Katrina? A wierd echo of Bush when he said, “I know the people of this part of the world are suffering…”

I wonder, also, why so much reaction to the displaced New Orleanians is resentful and even hostile...you'd think that when Hurricane Katrina uncovered a group of American citizens who have been living below what most would consider "the poverty line"--going without even basic housing and healthcare for generations--you'd think that the reaction would be more charitable for longer than a year. The logic of this reaction escapes me.